It is raining hard and the taxi is slipping and sliding up Aristipou Street on its way to the funicular ( a kind of tram) on Mt. Lycabettus. My guest is about to be treated to a panoramic, albeit rainy, view of the city from the balcony of St. George's chapel. The entrance to the funicular is about half-way up: a steep ten-minute walk from Kolonaki Square.

During the war we lived on the slopes of the hill in an old house on Anagnostopoulou Street, before being displaced by an errant shell that shattered our living room and our lives. The pathways up to the chapel were dotted with neo-classical houses, built among the dwarf pine trees. There was no tramway, but to the right of today's funicular entrance was an old flat- roofed residence, belonging to the Grillos family; it was the highest house in Athens. Downstairs there was a loom, the garden had a well, and a smaller house was tucked away in the back. An open terrace looked out on the Acropolis, the Saronic Gulf, Aegina and Mt. Hymettus. In 1961 an American physicist called Ron Geller rented the house: I was young, and fresh as mint, and Ron opened an American window in my mind. He introduced me to the poetry of Robert Frost, he told me about a performer called Bob Dylan, of a soprano folk singer called Joan Baez; he spoke of 12 string guitars, blues musicians and the poetry of high energy physics; his Greek friends included Constantine Tsoukalas, an historian, and Frosso Doxiadi, who later published the ''Portraits of Fayyum". Ron invited me to the States; I arrived in the summer of 1963 on the day that Martin Luther King was giving his "I have a Dream" speech in Washington, DC.

Five years later I returned to the house on Mt. Lycabettus. Although the funicular had been built, Aristipou Street was still a dirt track. Many of the older houses had been replaced with residential high-rises. Grillos' house had been rented to an Australian architect- turned - artist, Robert Dahncke. Other artists and foreigners lived in nearby houses: Chris Gear from England; Michael Piller from Oregon, who specialized in paintings of gorillas; Michel and Francoise Roux; Judy and Lou Efstathiou from the Boston Museum School; novelist Peter Dreyer and his wife Marika, exiles from South Africa; Gilbert Horobin, travel writer; author Peter Mayne; poets Alan Ansen, Jimmy Merrill, Chester Kallman, Sinclair Beilles; a young Greek actor, Petros Fissoun; an ephemeral character, called Princess Zena Rachevsky, then married to the film maker Conrad Rooks. There was also Don Munson, an American from Boston, who distinguished himself by making magnificent meals on the terrace, much as he did 20 years later in his Knightsbridge home for the likes of Ava Gardner, John Richardson and others.

When not eating on the terrace we scrambled up the side of the hill to Zoe’s two-room taverna. She had her own barrel of retsina, and the menu was whatever she had made for her family.

For more sophisticated evenings we trooped down to Paradissos taverna, beside the present St. George Lycabettus Hotel. The steaks were "outrageously" priced at 28 drch. Here we used to meet with Thanos Veloudios, the first Greek World War I pilot, and a young Canadian singer called Leonard Cohen, who lived on Hydra with his wife Marianne.

Visitors were many and varied: Umberto Valenzuela from the American Embassy used to come to the terrace and sit, with his neatly creased jeans, watching the endless parade of characters. One afternoon it's an American, Eric Solibakke, back from Bodh Gaya in India. He is chanting Homer, which is all the speaking he permits himself during his yearlong vow of silence. Another resident, Penny Midgely, an English ex-army officer, announces she is going to work as a PA for Stanley Sieger, a wealthy American living on the opposite hill, in Mets, in a building co-owned by book collector Harry Blackmer. I used to see Penny in London and was happy when she told me that Stanley had given an endowment for Modern Greek Studies to his alma mater, Princeton University. The Seeger Fund brings many Princetonians to Athens to study Greek and things Greek.

It was an unusual conglomeration of Greeks and foreigners. There was something special about being there at that time. But in 1971 the Grillos house was torn down, Aristipou Street was paved for the residents of the new high-rises, Zoe died, the Paradissos taverna closed, and along with it an era akin to Paris in the thirties.

The cab stops at the funicular entrance, we get out, and I look up. My friend asks: "Is there someone you know up there?'' I turn to him and say, ''Not anymore." and hurry in to get out of the rain.

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